The Evidence Against Her (5 page)

After Atlee Pomerene’s reelection to the U.S. Senate in 1916, the Claytor place became something of a political center. A good many men were pressing Dwight Claytor to consider a run for election to the U.S. House of Representatives in two years. They wanted him to challenge DeMott in the primary, in any case, with the hope of establishing a name for himself and winning the seat in 1920. Catherine no longer paid very much attention.

When her husband launched into a careful explanation of some business that troubled him, she settled back in her chair, her expression politely attentive. She gazed at him intently while her mind toyed with and turned over the seductive sounds of the exotic names she caught up out of his little discourse as though she were plucking threads out of her needlework—Carrizal, Chihuahua, Carranza, Pancho Villa.

She was equally detached when the talk turned to the war in Europe. So much impassioned rhetoric was cast into the atmosphere of her Ohio house that it affected her as if it were a sudden shift in weather: It brought on a constant, low throbbing in her head. She often lay in bed with the curtains drawn against the light late into the afternoon. By early 1917, the talk about the role the country should take in the war had gone on for months and months, had moved across the porch, invaded the sitting room, and resounded around her dining table. The idea of war had become so large on the horizon that it was no more urgent in her life than the idea of God, inevitable and unquestioned. The endless belaboring of the subject was tiresome to her and even baffling, and she often left the room without explanation, waving her hand in dismissal as the men began to rise from their seats when she stood to make an escape.

President Wilson called for a War Resolution before a joint session of Congress on April 2. By the time the Senate had approved it on April 4, and the House had concurred two days later, Catherine was beyond the reach even of the most simplistic patriotism. She let all the political agitation waft right by her, and she became so peculiarly vague and abstracted that it made Agnes uneasy, but it was probably the happiest season so far of Agnes’s youngest brother’s childhood. At first Edson was cautious, but he became emboldened and gregarious and a great favorite of all the company, some of whom visited with fair regularity.

When her mother’s attention drifted and she failed to notice that some bit of hospitality was called for, Agnes often stepped in as a sort of hostess. She was regularly in the vicinity of the men who congregated on the long, shaded porch or in the parlor and eyed her not so covertly with an unsettling interest. “Why, that’s a healthy-looking girl you have there, Dwight!” Her father never replied except with a vague nod, involved in a discussion about hog and wheat prices and the Lever Act.

But her mother would always find her later, Catherine’s attention suddenly caught hard and apparently concentrated by intense disgust. “How can you let those men
gawk
at you like that? How can you
be
so vulgar? At least you could bind your breasts! You . . . you flounce around the table like some . . . You have all the delicacy of one of the dairy cows! Like someone
coarse!
You don’t have any instinct . . . not an ounce of blood from my side of the family. No air of . . . subtlety. Refinement! And here we are in this
wilderness!
”

“Oh, Mama, please don’t,” Agnes would say softly. “Please don’t say things like that about me.” She could not bear to reveal that those furious images flung out into the air cut her to the quick and filled her with self-consciousness and mortifying shame of everything about herself. Instead Agnes would dredge up a teasing sort of jocularity.

“Now, Mama, you were exactly my age when you were presented at the Regimental Ball, weren’t you? What was that like? I know all the men there wanted to dance with you! What was your dress like? Was that the dress with the green sash?” Agnes knew how to do this, but she was always abashed and peculiarly embarrassed and humiliated for her mother and for herself, too. Because almost at once her mother’s fierce regard would lose its intensity; she would become reflective as Agnes’s questions took hold, and she might settle down and begin to reminisce, or she might wander off in a reverie.

But sometimes Catherine couldn’t be diverted, and any question only deflected her outrage. She would search out Edson and hector and badger him about one thing or another until he broke down, weeping and pleading with her to let him be. “Leave me alone, Mama! Leave me alone!” he would chant, his hands over his ears so that he could only hear his own voice as she lashed out at him—maddened somehow by any evidence of her children’s successful engagement with the world— calling him a sycophantic little fool. He only knew how terrible that must be because of its hissing sibilance. Nothing could stop her once she swung full force into her fury—not even the objection of his two brothers and certainly not any word from Agnes.

Catherine’s rage was less directed when her husband was at home, although all four children could sense it just simmering under the surface, manifesting itself in a sliding glance of scorn as she passed a bowl of mashed potatoes, or in a cautious, disdainful stiffening if a child brushed by too close. On days like those, her children sat at the table hoping that some other notion would distract their mother before they were—any one of them—alone in her company.

“Oh, you’re so pleased with yourself!” she rasped at Edson, bending over him as he leaned away from her, bearing down on him as he dissolved in misery. “But I’ll tell you, you’re too pretty for my taste! Too
charming
altogether! Oh, exactly like,
exactly
like your granddaddy. Ahh! And so polite! ‘Why, Mrs. Claytor, what a
good
little boy you have!’” she said in an enraged, high-pitched parody of some unctuous guest. “But I tell you what
I
think. You’re too sweet by far! Too good by half! A little mama’s boy! But not mine! Not mine! Not
this
mama. Sometimes I don’t know where you come from! I can’t imagine you’re any child of mine!”

None of her children had any memory of a long stretch of time during which Catherine Claytor had been easy spirited or even content, but this new and sustained frenzy was baffling. All of their lives Agnes and her youngest brother, Edson, were most likely to try to smooth out any situation that might dismay their mother. And it was Agnes and Edson who were generally the primary targets of her arid rages, her thin, long-limbed flurry through the rooms. But there were other moments of their growing up when it was one of the two of them around whom she spun a cocoon of gentle intimacy, her long fingers unexpectedly intertwining with their own while she invented long, mesmerizing, magical stories all about the adventures of a character named Uncle Tidbit.

She had reeled those tales off her tongue like songs, so unlike the clotted sputtering of her invective. Leaning forward eagerly, widening her eyes as the story became comic or exciting, she would look at Agnes or Edson with a gleefully beseeching glance, entreating them to share her delight. She still wound out these stories for Edson, and he would sit transfixed by this woman whose head canted forward on her long neck in affectionate inclusion, whose every word and gesture indicated her deep and dreamy pleasure in his company.

Sometimes, too, in a less rarefied atmosphere, just on any day, she would search out one or the other of them to repeat some compliment. She was matter-of-fact but betrayed her pride in them by dwelling on some attribute in exacting detail. All the examples of the fact that Agnes was smart as a whip, that it had been no surprise to Catherine to hear from Miss McCrory that Agnes was the brightest girl in her class. Or she might remind Edson that his great-aunt had said that he certainly was a real Alcorn, already tall for his age, and so handsome. So clever. A real charmer through and through.

Now and then, out of nowhere, she confided startling intimacies to one or the other of them. She disclosed some triumph of her early life, a beau who had adored her, the trim of a hat she had designed and that had turned out to be exactly right, the astonishing beauty she had possessed—and on this point she was particularly adamant, determined that they believe her. Catherine would become urgent in her intensity, agitated as she insisted on the evidence of old photographs or urged them to study the large portrait of her hanging in the parlor. “You see?” she said. “See there?”

It was a dark, ominously glistening oil painting, larger than life-size, of a stiff-looking young woman with worrisomely pink skin, a very green dress, and hands that blurred into the folds of her skirt. It never dawned on any of her children that it was not at all a good painting and bore only a slight resemblance to their mother; they took Catherine at her word that it was a fair representation of herself as a handsome young girl. It never occurred to them not to believe wholeheartedly in her former beauty. But neither Catherine herself, as she stood before the mirror hastily pinning her hair in a loose knot, nor Agnes, nor either of the middle boys, as they glanced at their mother to gauge the temperature of her mood, thought much about what she looked like in the moment.

The two middle Claytor children, Richard and Howard, were such a united front—only thirteen months apart—that they managed pretty well to be sufficient unto themselves; they wanted nothing to do with their mother. They had grasped her unreliability as a safe harbor, and they were far more likely to count on each other in any case. But Agnes and Edson were weighed down with a sense of their mother’s mysterious, inexorable, free-floating grief; they were unhappily aware of her fragility and vulnerability, and, therefore, their connection to her was a stickier business altogether. Agnes felt responsible for her mother, but in 1917, Edson, at ten years old, was too young not to be tantalized by the infrequent evidence of his mother as a woman to whom he was dear. He was heartbroken by and infatuated with what seemed to him the tragedy of his mother’s life.

And also at age ten he was suddenly disenchanted with his sister, Agnes. Whenever his mother was driven into a rage at Agnes’s flamboyance—at the attention she drew to herself when she served coffee to her father’s guests, for example— Edson counted it against his sister, too. It seemed to him that she was forever bringing trouble down upon their heads. All three of her brothers thought Agnes was bossy. Their mother was often truly frightening, but Agnes just made them mad.

Agnes knew why those men loitering on the porch paid attention to her; she had discovered that she was at an age that attracted attention. But she wasn’t sure if she was pretty or not, although she knew that neither of her parents thought so. If her mother was in one of her dark moods, she muttered over Agnes’s hair, blaming Agnes for its coarse, dark, curly profusion, saying she didn’t know how Agnes could bear to be seen in public with hair exactly like some gypsy or colored girl and skin the color of pea soup.

Her mother’s disappointment in her only daughter’s looks had been a theme in Agnes’s life as far back as she could remember, and she had long ago accommodated her deep shame at her exuberant hair and the awful, yellowish cast of her skin. She bound her breasts with a length of muslin beneath her camisole in an effort to deflect attention, in a hopeless attempt to shape her figure into one of long-limbed, willowy elegance her mother would approve. She reminded herself to be guarded around the girls at school who seemed to admire her, because she knew that they must be insincere. Agnes knew that she would seem foolish if she ever appeared to believe in or rely on her own attractiveness. And she was grateful sometimes, in softer moments, when her mother was less direct and seemed to find Agnes’s appearance tolerable.

She eventually discounted entirely the opinion of William Dameron, whose father managed the Claytor farm and who was two years older than she. They had been playmates outside of school all during their childhood; they had established a secret meeting place beneath the willows beside the creek, had spent hours constructing camouflaged hideouts where they could elude “the others”—William’s older sister, Bernice, and all their younger brothers, none of whom was particularly interested in finding them. Agnes and William Dameron spent many concentrated hours of their young lives together, but William retreated to little more than a distant sort of cordiality when he reached his teens, and Agnes didn’t think much about it because she had new involvements herself once she started school at the Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls.

But William had sought her out the day before he left for Canada to join the RCAF in the summer of 1916 and found her outside sitting in the swing by the croquet court. She had visited the Damerons’ house with her family a few days earlier to wish him good-bye and good luck. Mrs. Dameron had served cake, and the occasion had been fairly festive, but Agnes hadn’t had a chance to speak to him alone, and she was glad to see him. They talked about his sister Bernice, who was at Oberlin College and hadn’t been at home when the Claytors visited. William asked her about what she planned after her last year at school, and they just talked comfortably for a little while.

William lounged against the tree with his arms folded across his chest. “I hope you understand about my joining up,” he said to her, and she looked back at him pleasantly enough; she didn’t say that she hadn’t given it much thought one way or another. “You know, it’s not that I especially want to get into the war, Agnes, but America’s going to be in it soon enough. It makes sense to me to sign up while I have a chance to get into flying. They’ll take anyone who’ll sign up. What I mean is, I don’t have any experience, but it won’t matter. I’m good with engines. I’ll get the chance to train to be a pilot right off the bat! But it’s not like these fellows who just want to get into the war because it seems like an adventure. Or that they . . . Well, I don’t know what they’re thinking, of course, but what I mean is that I don’t have some grand idea about the whole thing. I didn’t want you to think that. I didn’t just decide out of the blue. It wasn’t some sort of idea of being a hero. I do think it’s important. I think it’s the right thing to do. But now that I’m about to leave it’s hard to know what will happen. It’s hard to know when I’ll see my family again. Or when I’ll see you, either.”